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Friday, September 7, 2012

Enter

It was just a Wednesday. The
worst day of the week, because it starts with a gawky, unsexy W. Because it has
a big old “D” in the middle that you don’t pronounce. Because it hovers there
midweek like a poisonous mushroom, a thing to dread and somehow muddle through
only to discover that it’s only freaking Thursday.

I shuddered through it,
sitting at my desk, surrounded by coworkers that I liked well enough not to steal
from or take out in a blaze of USPS-worker fury some bleary morning. It was weekly
workday-ish. Meeting-y. Red flagged and I-need-this-yesterday-ized.

As I ate my microwave lasagna
lunch, I surfed for shoes I didn’t need, I read six articles about superhero
movies I would never see, and I began to covet a $400 Asian ball-jointed elf
doll that would fit in neither my home nor my economic stratum.

And so it hit me, like a
thunderbolt, like middle age, like that icy realization that something is not
right. I need to start a blog.

We are surrounded by this
ubiquitous technology that allows us to vomit up information and display it on
every visible surface. Our once private thoughts are now writ large, our dull little
shoebox lives have become adventures to chronicle.

I fume as I read them, the
blogs of the amateurs. Their dear little posts all lowercased in an adorable baby-type
that makes my eyes burn: o i m 2 cute 2
use big letterz haha :) You’re not so precious, you’re just lazy. Hitting
the Shift key takes but a pinky’s worth of energy. Is it really so hard? Have
we become so post-modern that we must rebel against the very structure of
language?

What goads me, I think, is
the sheer ego of it all. Look at me and
my funny, funny life! Every fool with a keyboard has become a media outlet
of wit and whimsy. There are t-shirts and book deals.

I say this, of course, from
my ivory tower, where my fancy writing degree is displayed prominently at the
bottom of a storage box filled with old journals and high school yearbooks. But
I might as well be wearing it on my head like a crown, for it blazes forth from
my consciousness wherever I go, a secret symbol of my dread, if rarely used,
power. It says, “Behold, for I wield language like a mighty sword of truth. My
words will provide solace for the weary and strike fear into the hearts of evil
men.” It says other things, too, whispering in my ear like a jilted lover, murmuring
like the echoes of a magical spell.

Because there is something
else out there, behind the fanboy reviews and toddler anecdotes, behind the
overshared, Instagrammed mess of our not-so-private lives. There is community. There
is appreciation of our small and ragged artistic endeavors. There is humanity’s
collective effort to be heard amid the din of the great and expanding universe.
Hello. I did some things today.

And so I will join the fray,
add my voice to the screaming millions that fill up the virtual hallways of the
Internet like so many angry, opinionated hornets. I will be brilliant or I will
be stupid. I will be poetic, prophetic, or bitchy. My words will sear into your
soul or you will forget them as soon as you read them. It doesn’t matter. I
claim this one brief instant of recorded history for my own.